Introduction

The generational trauma of the AIDS crisis profoundly impacted the ways in which gay men coming of age at the time of the epidemic engaged in sexual practices and connected with one another. In this chapter, I propose a way to reconstruct the impacts of novel methods of prevention that change the perceptions of HIV prevention and sexual practices among gay men in later life who had experienced the trauma of the AIDS crisis first-hand. I present an account of Allan (pseudonym), a gay man in his sixties, as a case of recovering the joy and intimacy of sexual encounters among those whose lives had been deeply affected by the catastrophic generational experience. In focusing on the account of a single gay man, I intend to contextualise his experience within the trajectory of his life and – as Allan understood it – the story of his generation.

In the first section of this chapter, I present a generational approach to social HIV research, including some of the most commonly used age cohort classifications. In the sections that follow, I introduce Allan and present his account, highlighting the reconstruction of his understandings of AIDS history as he begins using biomedical HIV prevention. In this chapter, I focus on the aspects of gay HIV experience that are common for many Western countries with low-level epidemics concentrated in gay and bisexual communities. This is despite the fact that the experience of the AIDS crisis in Aotearoa New Zealand was in many ways unique; interested readers may find it described in detail in the works of other authors (for example, Davis, 1996, Dickson et al, 2015). In particular, the existing research contains rich accounts of the experiences of HIV by Aotearoa New Zealand’s Indigenous people, the Māori (see, for instance, Grierson et al, 2004; Henrickson, 2006; Aspin, 2007; Rua’ine, 2007).

The method of HIV prevention at the centre of this chapter is pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). This involves taking antiretroviral medication prior to sexual HIV exposure in order to reduce the risk of HIV acquisition. The effectiveness of PrEP alone is so high that on a practical level, when used correctly, it virtually removes the risk of HIV for its users (BPAC NZ, 2019).